


Got Away With None

by jouissant



Category: The Lady Came from Baltimore - Joan Baez (Song)
Genre: Crimes & Criminals, F/F, First Kiss, Historical, Secret Identity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-27
Updated: 2016-05-27
Packaged: 2018-07-10 15:29:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,129
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6991270
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jouissant/pseuds/jouissant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lou first laid eyes on her sitting at the train station.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Got Away With None

**Author's Note:**

  * For [xenoglossy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/xenoglossy/gifts).



> Thanks for prompting me to check out this song! I had a ton of fun writing for you, and I hope you enjoy! :)

Lou first laid eyes on her sitting at the train station, the way she and Frankie always used to do in those days. 

They were on the platform watching the people drift by, casually looking for their next mark. The day was hot, and Lou was sweaty at the temples and the upper lip. Days like these she was glad she wore her hair short. She swiped the back of her hand across her mouth, chewed hard on the half a loaf of day-old bread they'd gotten off a soft touch of a baker, a twist on one of their oldest cons. When they were younger Frankie always played the sickly little brother, Lou his doting sister. She used to get all wide-eyed and tearful about the mother who'd run off to California or died of the consumption or what have you, and it always worked a treat. 

Now Frankie was the poor sap who'd lost his job, got his little wife in the family way and not a penny to his name to feed her with, sir, we was bound for Oklahoma but the land got speculated right out from under us, can you believe that. And that was a harder sell; you had to find just the right person, though she mostly did. Everyone said Lou Gold was an excellent judge of character. She always brought along a moth-eaten pillow to shove up under her dress for authenticity's sake, and now she was sitting on it to spare her ass on the hard station bench. 

Frankie was talking the way he always talked when they were at the station, about how much money you needed to buy two tickets out west and how they'd endeavor to get it. "First thing I do after I pay off Hardin," he said. 

"You'll spend it all on beer and penny candy the way you do now," Lou said. "Which is why you ain't paid him off yet." Frankie socked her in the arm and told her to shut her trap, he'd really do it this time, swear to God, only Lou wasn't listening, because the four o'clock from Baltimore had just cruised onto platform 3. 

Lou would tell herself sometimes that it had all been fate, some mystic force drawing them together like you heard about in stories. But the truth of it was the lady who got off the train was wearing lace, all lace from top to toe. Lou might've been half boy but she still had Ma's eye for finery, and when she saw all that lace there was something in her that swam up out of her mouth and wanted, the way she wanted to leap over the bakery counter and make off with a dozen chocolate eclairs, stuff her face with those instead of stale charity bread. 

The idea came to her all at once, a chunk of providence that fell right into her lap like pigeon shit. "Frankie," she said. He was still yammering on about the frontier. She whacked him hard across the chest. _"Frankie."_

"What, dammit?" 

"Hit me." She got up from the bench. The pillow flopped onto the platform at her feet, but she didn't pay it any mind at all. 

_"What?"_

"Get up right now," Lou said, "and sock me in the face." 

She looked over her shoulder. The lady had stepped into a shard of sunlight. She was the color of a creampuff, of the pear blossoms on the promenade that drove the bees crazy. Lou had never eaten a creampuff, but she looked at them in the shop windows all the time. And she mostly thought the bees were a nuisance, and the pear blossoms by association, but that hardly mattered now. As Lou watched, the lady tilted her fine doll-boned wrist and consulted a watch. She frowned, bit her rosebud lip. Oh, she was lovely. And she was rich as a queen, Lou just knew it. 

"You still want that train ticket?" she hissed at Frankie. 

He squinted at her. "Huh? Sure, you know I do." 

"Well, I just got a notion that'll get you that and more," she said. "Pay off Hardin twice over. But you've got to look sharp and get off your ass, and you've got to hit me." 

"What the hell are you talking about? Why would I hit you?" 

She heaved a sigh, sat back down beside him and leaned over to talk into his ear. He smelled like he needed a shower, which probably meant she smelled about the same. She switched to breathing through her mouth. "You see her over there?" 

The lady was accepting a pair of stamped-leather traveling cases from a busboy. Lou's throat tightened up and sour spit flooded her mouth. She hated to hang her hat on someone else like this. Better to get Frankie's part over with and set off alone.

"Yeah?" he asked. "What about her?" 

"She look rich to you?" 

"Sure, like half the people coming off that train. What of it?" 

"You know how we've been talking," she said. "About something big?" 

"Well, sure, but that was later, right? We were gonna plan it out." 

"I just planned it out," she said. "You're going to act like you're spurning me. Or—no, I'm spurning you, that's better. I'm spurning you and you're sore about it, and we get into a fight and you pop me one." 

He dragged his hand back through his hair. "What's that got to do with her?" 

"She'll take pity on me, of course," Lou said. "Take me in." 

"You're nuts. She'll never." 

"She will. I know she will." She smacked him on the arm again, cast around to make sure no one saw them talking, though she guessed as stern as she must look now they could pass for lovers on the verge of a tiff. "I've got a feeling about it." 

"Oh, you've got a feeling." 

"Like at the bank," she said, adding emphasis with a bony elbow. "That kind of feeling." 

He groaned, and she knew she had him. The bank hadn't been the tidiest thing ever, sure, and it got them afoul of Hardin, which you might say wasn't worth the first cent of their take. But she'd picked their mark, the sweet old lady with a fat suede purse like a tick-swollen dog's ear. And sure, maybe they'd messed up, stepping on Hardin's toes the way they had, and maybe that was the reason they owed him in the first place. But that didn't change the fact that she had a nose. Even Frankie had to admit that. 

"Come on," she wheedled. 

"Shit," he said. "You're crazy, Lou, you know?" But he was getting up off the bench, so he could call her what he liked. "What do you want me to do?" he asked. 

"What I said. Start yelling and chase me over by that swell over there in the lace dress, and when we're good and close you grab me and hit me." 

He frowned. "Lou—" 

"Trust me," she said. "I'll meet you in a couple days in the usual place. I'll leave a message if I have to. It'll be fine." 

"I don't want to—" 

"It's nothing," she said. "Now come on." 

With that, she got up. Her dress swished around her ankles and she made a face at the way it clung, the way she couldn't move right. Frankie just stood there and stared, and did she have to do absolutely everything? She opened her mouth. He shook his head, but it was too late. Ma always said, once Lou gets a thought in her head. 

"Get away from me!" she screamed, and immediately everyone on the platform froze. Didn't look up, no, not yet; they were all too busy hoping the trouble would dissipate, buzz off like the annoying fly it was. No, they simply halted, even the lady in the cream lace, though Lou's whole plan hinged on the slightly wild notion that what came next would move her differently than it did everyone else. She knew it would. She didn't know how she knew, but she did. 

"Lou—" 

"I won't," she spat at Frankie. "I've told you know over and over, and still you—DON'T you lay your hands on me, sir, don't—" 

Her face was a gnashing rictus, but inside she sang. For Frankie had moved at last from beside the bench, putting up his fists, taking up her dance. You couldn't always count on the boy for brains, but he was like a plow horse; he'd throw muscle behind any project once you got him going. Now, he reached for her, quick as you'd snatch a dollar from the air before the wind spun it away. He was quick enough to get hold of her dress front, and the spark of anger she felt at that wasn't just for show. How dare he, she thought, how _dare_ he, she could feel the air on her hot skin and the gasp of the crowd, watching raptly now. But it was better that way, wasn't it; better that she play it honest, this whirling, spitting pantomime. 

He grabbed her back then, yanked her to him. This time her dress held. 

"Goddammit," he growled, his face a mask, and when he drew his fist back she realized she was afraid. A storm of pain in her teeth, a flood of copper to follow and she flung out wide, staggering. When she reeled towards her audience she felt like an ice skater, arms akimbo, spine an arc. Before her the lady straightened, and Lou thought wildly that she was very tall, and that her body in all of that lace was like a swan's. 

Lou's head swam. He must've really got me, she thought. Good old Frank. She went to her knees; she knew she had by the bite of the wooden platform. There was a curtain of white come down before her then, and she had the splinter of a moment to feel triumphant before it was swept off by the roaring dark. 

***

Lou awoke to more lace, and as she lay there and stared and watched the pattern undulate she realized it was a curtain, that the window beyond it was open. By the light it was afternoon, though when precisely it was and how long she'd been here she couldn't say. She might have been lying here forever by the stiffness roosting in her muscles. She tried to sit up, the throbbing in her head punishing her for having the audacity. 

"God," she groaned, sinking back into the mattress. 

The bed she lay in was unsurpassingly soft, the pillows like great downy clouds. She put an arm out and ran it along the fitted sheet, a swathe of cool cotton, and she nearly groaned again, this time with pleasure. She smacked her mouth and found it gummy with dried blood; flakes of maroon had come off on the pillow where she'd rolled about unconscious. She grinned. It hurt, the motion testing the fresh-knit edges of a split lip, but she grinned all the wider. The room where Lou lay was the finest room she'd ever been in; hell, she could've sold the sheets out from under her to be made into petticoats and make more cash than she or Frankie had seen in months.

There was a movement then from the corner of the room, and all at once the mass of white Lou had taken for a pile of blankets resolved into a figure, who tugged a duvet down from around her face and sat up, blinking into the parchment-colored light. 

It was her, no doubt about it. The lady from Baltimore. Up close Lou could see that she was more girl than woman. She had wide-set eyes that gave her a look of perpetual surprise, and now they were red-rimmed like a rabbit's, from sleep or from crying. Lou couldn't think what she could have to cry over. Her brown hair had worked mostly free of a chignon. 

"Oh," she said to Lou. "You're awake!" 

"Um," Lou said. 

The girl sprang up, half tripping over her discarded covers. She hurried to the bed and crawled up alongside Lou, who felt inclined to shrink back against the headboard just on instinct. 

"Do you feel all right? You must be terribly thirsty. It's so close in here; I thought you'd better have the blankets just in case, but oh, you're sweating—" She reached for Lou's brow as if to check for fever, but as quickly as she'd bounded onto the bed she seemed to realize her zeal. She let her hand drop into her lap. 

"Oh, God," she said. "Look at me, rampaging all over the place. I'm sure you're terrified, poor thing. You've no idea where you are." 

Lou swallowed. "Where am I, then?" 

"Why, you're in my guest room," she said. 

"Who are you?" 

"Susan," she said. "Susan Moore.You're in my father's townhouse."

"Townhouse," Lou said. "He got a country house?" 

Susan laughed, a sound that was altogether throatier than Lou would have imagined. "He does, as a matter of fact," she said. "I was just there the other week, with my aunt. But goodness, you don't care about that. Tell me how you're feeling." 

Lou scratched at the back of her head. The hair there was matted with sweat and something else, which she pried at with a fingernail. Her stomach lurched at the way it flaked free. You sure got me, Frank, she thought. "Hungry," she said. And then, mostly because she wanted to know what the girl would say: "What—what happened to me?" 

Susan's face fell; she took on the solemn and statuesque air of one who is about to say something very serious and very important, and who expects to have such moments documented somehow. She held out her hand again and set it atop Lou's knee over the duvet. Her nails were shell-pink and very clean; Lou couldn't think of the last time she'd seen someone without some honest dirt underneath their fingernails. 

"That man at the station," she said. "Was he—" 

"My beau," Lou said. She used to blush something fierce when the two of them started running that particular con; she didn't anymore, but she wished she could. It would've made a more realistic picture. 

"Your beau?" 

"Well, not anymore. I left him, see?" 

She nodded slowly, her big eyes wide as dinner plates. "And so he hit you," she said, voice clear and slow like she understood everything. Lou thought she seemed a bit motherly that way; she had that cool and soothing sort of look, like she could lay a wet washcloth over all your hurts. 

Lou nodded. "Wasn't the first time. Wasn't the first time I tried to get shut of him, either. He didn't listen. I was trying to make a train, get away from once and for all, but he followed me." 

"How awful," Susan said. Her hand had begun to run back and forth over Lou's knee, and the feel of it made Lou feel both drowsy and sick. 

It was strange; here in this room she felt she might well be this girl she was describing after all, a girl who'd been trying so hard to get away, beating herself bloody against a windowpane. 

"Why did you bring me here?" Lou asked. 

Susan shrugged. "You fell right at my feet," she said, as if that explained everything. "And you were bleeding; some of it got on my dress, look."

She smoothed down her skirt; sure enough, there was a delicate spray of scarlet there, and the sight of it made Lou want to wail. Her mouth throbbed; she probed at an especially sore tooth with her tongue and tried to suss out whether or not it was loose. 

"I'm sorry," she said. She hated how she sounded. Don't be wet, she told herself. Look at where you've landed. 

"Don't fret about it," Susan said firmly. "Not for one minute. And don't you fret about leaving here, either; you can stay as long as you like. And…and we don't have to talk about that awful man either. The police will find him," she said, "And they'll bring him to justice." She smiled at Lou. "There, I told myself I'd tell you that as soon as you woke up." She settled deeper into the froth of the bedclothes; she seemed at greater ease, and Lou thought of the society ladies that came to ladle out porridge on Sundays, and how they must feel sitting in their parlors afterwards. Her stomach chose that moment to make a sound like an ungreased hinge, and she clutched at it, mortified out of her smugness. 

Susan laughed, and Lou hated her for it. Just a little, but enough—and that was better, wasn't it, that was much better. She made herself catch Susan's eye and give a wry little grin. 

"Sorry," she said again. "Dunno when I ate last." 

"Of course you don't, you poor thing," Susan said. "Here, you'll want a wash, too. I'll have Gracie draw your bath and in the meantime I'll run down to the kitchen and see what we've got for you. We missed lunch in all the hubbub," she said, sounding disappointed, "But there's always stuff for sandwiches." 

"I can do the bath myself," Lou said. "It's no trouble." The last thing she needed was some housemaid creeping around. She'd have Lou pegged in a hot minute. 

"If you're sure," Susan said. "But let me help you in, hmm? If you fall and hit your head I'll never forgive myself, and Papa said you weren't allowed to die, it'd be bad publicity." 

"Publicity?" 

Susan flung her hand about like she was waving off a fly. "For his law firm," she said. "But he was only teasing." She spoke quickly enough that Lou knew he hadn't been. 

Lou found herself hefted from the bed like a sack of flour, Susan grunting to take her weight. She was underfed, was Lou, but rawboned. Lou thought to drag her feet for spite, to test the girl's mettle, but as they made their way across the room she saw how Susan's face reddened and how her breast heaved and she felt bad about it. 

"I can make it the rest of the way," she said, and she let Susan set her against the doorway of the great bathroom, and had to bite her lip to keep from hooting at the notion of a room so big one got out of breath hauling a reasonable-sized girl across it. 

The bathroom was just as grand, done up in white and gold. There were fluffy towels stacked on a little bench in the corner, a robe to match hung behind the door, and a deep plunge pool of a bathtub like nothing Lou had ever seen. She gaped without meaning to. All at once her skin itched like it was crawling with red ants, and she tried to think of the last time she'd had a decent wash. 

"I guess I'll leave you," Susan said, recalling Lou from her reverie. She realized she was just standing there staring at the basin of the tub, Susan hovering awkwardly behind her, having picked up a towel she presumably meant to hand to Lou. 

"Right," Lou said. 

"I'll lay out a dress for you. It might not be the best fit, but—" 

"It'll be fine." 

"Of course." Susan smiled, and Lou felt something in her belly lurch, like the time she and Frankie went on the Ferris wheel and got stuck and the wind kicked up. 

"Only—" Susan started. 

"What?" 

"Only I don't know your name. I looked in your purse—I'm sorry, but we thought we should try and find out who you were. Anyway, there was nothing. Do you suppose he took your money?" 

"M-maybe," Lou said. Yes, maybe he did, maybe I'll be needing a little something to get on with. "It's Lou," she said. "Louise, but nobody calls me that." 

"Nice to meet you, Lou," Susan said. 

***

Lou steeped in the bath for as long as she could stand, until her skin shrank up and she felt thoroughly waterlogged. She dunked her head and rubbed soap through her hair; she tried every one of the rich unguents rimming the bath. As she did she thought of her next move, and how useful it was that Susan had set her such a luxurious timeline. 

She got out of the bath and dressed in the clothes laid out for her, a blue cotton day dress that was too flouncy by far, probably a remnant of seasons past though the floral print was crisp and unfaded. She missed her trousers; if only she'd had them on instead of that lousy dress from before. Presently there came a knock on the door: Susan, carrying a tea tray. Fumbling with it, more like; she was unpracticed, and she nearly overturned a cup as she set the tray down on the writing desk. 

"I had the cook make you a ham sandwich," she said. "That's all she'd allow, I'm afraid; they're already on dinner and she nearly blew a gasket to see me in the kitchen at all." 

"Isn't it your kitchen?" Lou accepted the plate; it contained the aforementioned sandwich, and set beside it a peach the color of a sunset. She hadn't had a peach in years. 

"Well, yes, but Cook runs the show. She'd chase Father out if he got in her way." 

The sandwich was perfect, both slices of bread spread thickly with butter. She ate one half right away and then started on the peach, wanting to save the second. The peach was just this side of overripe, so that she barely needed her teeth at all. Just the pressure of her lips had the skin bursting, the juice sweeter and more copious than seemed possible. She closed her eyes unbidden and let the taste play over her tongue, and when she opened them again Susan was watching her, unblinking. Her mouth hung just slightly open; her cheeks florid as the peach. Lou's mouth was full of fruity spit; she swallowed, hard.

"Do you want a bite?" 

Susan nodded. She reached out, and Lou thought she meant to take the fruit from her. But Susan took her by the wrist instead, her grip stronger than seemed possible given her build, given the way she'd struggled to heft Lou to the bathroom earlier. She took Lou's wrist in her fingers and brought the peach to her lips that way, and when she bit a tendril of juice ran down along the tendons toward Lou's elbow. For a wild moment Lou thought the other girl meant to lick it off, but she didn't. Their eyes met and all at once she let Lou go, swallowed her bite of peach and picked up the starchy-white napkin. 

"Here," she said, and Lou took it, wiping her arm off. The fabric was stiff; she'd be sticky all over, and her just out of the bath. But she'd smelled of worse than peach juice, and Susan was looking at her in a way that made Lou feel hot all over. 

"Do you like it?" Susan said, her voice soft as suede. 

Lou nodded, slowly, drunkenly. "It's good." 

"I love peaches," Susan said. "I'm so glad they're in season." Susan grabbed the napkin herself and drew it across her mouth. "Eat the rest of your sandwich. You must still be hungry." 

Lou complied, eating slowly now, savoring every bite. She wished she were alone; it was strange to be watched like this, to have her pleasure appraised. And Susan kept looking, with that same strange hunger on her face. It was only when Lou had finished that she lost that look of singular intensity and sat back, her expression clear again like a sky blown free of clouds. 

"I can show you around if you like," Susan said. "Father is at the office; he may not be back tonight, so you'll have to wait to meet him. But I can show you the house, and the grounds. The garden here's not half as nice as the one in the country, I'm afraid." 

"I'm sure it's fine," Lou said, having never had occasion to comment on the state of anyone's garden one way or another. 

The garden was fine indeed, swollen with roses and alive with bees, probably the very same blasted bees from the promenade. Lou was no friend to a bee, but Susan seemed to come alive in the garden in nearly the same way as she had in front of that peach. The bees flung themselves from flower to flower, Lou caught in the crossfire, and as she batted and cursed at them Susan laughed again. This time Lou found it slightly less infuriating, though she couldn't have said why. 

That was the garden; the rest of the house was grand to match, the nicest house Lou had set foot in by far. When she was little, before Ma died, she used to say she hoped Lou could go and work in a house in the city, as a lady's maid or a cook. It was curious, thought Lou, that Ma had never dreamed her the head of such a house, or maybe it wasn't curious at all. Maybe Ma had been a realist. Either way, Lou was pretty sure she'd never have placed her girl here, under these particular circumstances. 

***

Alone in the guest room that night, she thought she ought to get herself together. She'd kept a sharp eye out on that tour of the house, saw the finely wrought candlesticks and the cut crystal, had a decent idea of where the silver would be. There was furniture here that was worth a mint, which she only knew from Old Man Marcus, who'd had a glass eye and a monocle strapped to his good one and who painted castoffs to look like antiques, did so well enough to fool a certain class of people who were less canny than Lou but less moneyed than Susan. There'd be jewelry too; there didn't seem to be a Mrs. Moore, but surely there had been, and surely Susan had some trinkets for special occasions. It might take a little time to take stock, but time, Lou thought, was one thing she had in abundance. Tomorrow she'd get out, get a note to Frankie. She'd find some pretense—a friend to meet with, someone who had to know she was all right. 

There was a knock at the bedroom door then; without waiting for an answer Susan opened it a crack and peered inside. "Can I come in?" she asked. 

Lou nodded, and Susan slipped into the room. She was wearing a long nightgown, cutting a pale figure that reminded Lou of the first time she'd seen her, stepping off of the train. It seemed impossible that that had been just hours ago. Already it felt as if her old life was retreating somehow, curling back like a tide.

Susan hovered beside the bed until Lou patted the mattress, and then she crawled up and settled next to her eagerly, like a puppy.

"Are you settling in?" Susan asked. 

"I suppose," Lou said. "It's just so strange," she said. "Being here, instead of—"

Susan put her hand on Lou's arm. "Oh, poor thing, you're shivering," she said."Shh. I know. It must be an awful shock. But you're here now, and that's what matters. You've no need to worry about anything else." She laid back against the pillows. "Lie down," she said, and Lou did. She laid her head right alongside Susan's body, so that when Susan draped her arm over Lou and gathered her close the side of her face pressed to Susan's breast. She smelled powdery, like an infant, and Lou closed her eyes and drew a shaky breath. Lying here she allowed that she did feel comforted, and that was queer, wasn't it, for she hadn't any reason to need comforting. But still she lay, and breathed in that milky odor, and presently she felt Susan's fingers in her hair, and then she fell asleep. 

***

Lou didn't get out to meet Frankie the next day, or the day after that. Susan fretted for a start; said she'd had word Lou's nonexistent beau had been spotted lurking about, which Lou found perplexing, unless Frankie had followed them from the station. But perhaps he had, on second thought; that would be like Frankie, to want to know just where she was. More likely than not he'd be casing the place himself, the better to razz her about it later. The stone cherubs in the garden, Lou, the roses. Well, let him prowl around. She'd get out when she could, and meanwhile she was living like a queen. She did feel a little bad about it, though, and hoped the Hardin gang had taken pity on him. That would come with a cost, but no matter. Like she told him, see this job through and they'd buy the whole operation lock stock and barrel. 

On the third morning Susan said her father was home for breakfast and they'd better go and meet him. He stayed away, she said, when he was working on a big case the way he was now, only coming home for the occasional meal and to sleep in a real bed. 

"Sometimes he sleeps on the chaise in his office, don't you, Papa? I always tell him he'll get sick, catch his death, but he doesn't listen to me." 

Mr. Moore looked up from his newspaper. "I've told you over and over, where I sleep's got nothing to do with getting sick," he said. "Not unless it's in a poorhouse. Poor bastards getting the cholera left and right, tuberculosis." He shook his head. 

He spoke to his daughter, but his eyes were fixed on Lou. His face was expressionless, but still his gaze chilled her: it seemed he saw straight through to her very bones, could read every last thought in her head. "Have you ever lived in a poorhouse, Miss—" 

"Gold," Lou said. 

"Louise Gold," supplied Susan. "Isn't that a lovely name?" 

"Have you?" said Mr. Moore again. 

"Papa is very interested in the plight of the lower classes," Susan said. 

"I dunno," Lou said. "Ma had us in a home a few years." 

"Us?" Susan asked. "Do you have brothers and sisters?" 

Shit, Lou thought. _Shit._ "A brother," she said. 

"Just the one?" 

She swallowed. "That's right." She leaned forward, ran a finger idly over the sinuous walnut curve of a dining chair. Mr. Moore closed his newspaper with a snap and folded it up, set it beside his plate. 

"Susan, ring in for Cook," he said, though the bell sat at his elbow. "And have a seat, Miss Gold, by all means." His tone seemed to imply a dare. Lou looked to Susan, but she was absorbed in retrieving the bell from the other side of the table. So Lou sat, feeling Mr. Moore's eyes on her and feeling certain she'd done the exact wrong thing. 

"Help yourself to coffee," Mr. Moore said, as though he were asking her to watch her step over the side of a cliff. She took up the pot and poured, and when she was finished she passed it over to Susan, who'd taken her own seat across the table. She took the silver carafe from Lou wordlessly, with a nod of thanks. 

Hell, Lou thought, and splashed in as much cream and sugar as she liked, which was a lot. 

"I've told Lou she's welcome to stay as long as she likes," Susan said, as breakfast was spirited into the dining room on fine silver trays like round moons. Lou counted them—one two three four—and she counted the servingware, the tongs, even the little jam spoons. She could help clear, she thought wildly; she could see where it all went. 

"Ah," said Mr. Moore. 

"She's come from a bit of a difficult situation, you see." 

Lou blushed, and busied herself buttering a slice of toast. 

Mr. Moore set his knife down with an unpleasant clink that seemed to ring out in the dining room like a herald. "I trust you're not on the run from the law, Miss Gold." 

Lou took an overlarge bite of toast and took her time choking it down, so that when she was finished she was quite composed, enough so that she could turn to him sweetly and say, "Why of course not, Mr. Moore." 

"I'm sorry about Papa," Susan said later, after her father had taken his newspaper and a cup of coffee upstairs. "He's ever so gruff all the time. He's been like that ever since my mother died." They were still sitting at the table, the breakfast detritus around them. Lou's belly was full of toast and jam and at least three rashers of bacon, and she was dangerously near to content. Susan had taken one of the nodding, long-stemmed blush roses from the vase at the center of the table and was plucking it apart petal by petal, piling the little slips of pink on a saucer. 

"How did she die?" Lou asked. 

"Tuberculosis," Susan said. "Almost ten years ago now. How strange that it's been so long." She pressed her fingernail into a rose petal, dividing and subdividing. The room was heady as a bower; Lou half-expected more bees. 

"I'm sorry," Lou said. "My mother died too." 

"How? If you don't mind me asking." 

Lou shrugged. "I don't know, really. Like I said, she had us in a home, my brother and me. For orphans, or kids who might as well be. We were there a couple years; we worked doing laundry, loads and loads of white sheets for all the grand hotels in the city. You hear bad things about places like that but it wasn't awful. Hard work, and your hands hurt like hell all the time, but not awful, not like it could've been. Anyway, one day they came and told us our ma was dead, waved around something they said was a death certificate. They said we had six months to work to pay off our room and board, and we did it. We could've stayed—my brother wanted to stay. But we left." 

"My goodness," said Susan. 

"No goodness about it." 

"No, of course not. I'm—I'm sorry, Lou." 

Lou shrugged. "It's all right. And I'm sorry again about yours. It's not right, I don't reckon, for any kid to lose a mother." 

"No, I don't reckon it is either." The phrasing seemed all the more clumsy subjected to her fine diction, and Lou might've felt mean about it some other time, but she wasn't now. For Susan smiled at her across the table, her doe's eyes big and sad. 

***

Night again, and again they were sitting on the bed. This time, though, they were in Susan's room. You may as well come in here, she'd said. I've got all my books and it's not worth me lugging them all over the house with me. She had a book on her lap, and she was reading it. Lou was watching her. 

"Your lip is looking better," Susan said after awhile. 

Lou ran her tongue over her bottom lip. There was a scabbed place there, sore from the work of speaking and eating, and another sore spot on the inside where Frankie's fist had ground her teeth against the inside of her mouth. "Feels better," she said. 

"Are you all right?" Susan asked, setting her book aside. 

"Sure," said Lou. 

"Because if you want to talk—" 

"No," said Lou. "That's quite all right. I'd rather just forget it. All of it. And look, you've been very nice, but—"

"Where did you say you were going?" 

"Huh?" 

Susan sat forward. "At the train station. You said you were going somewhere, to get away from—what was his name, did you say?"

"Francis," Lou said, because Frankie's given name was close at hand, and because she'd pretended her brother into something else so many times it seemed she might as well keep on. 

"Francis," Susan said back, like she was trying the name on for size. Lou didn't like that; it seemed as if she went pawing around too long she'd find nothing had the weight it should have, like Mr. Marcus's fake antiques. 

"So where were you going, to get away from Francis?" 

"West," Lou said quickly. "I don't know where, just—just west." 

"Mmm," Susan said dreamily. "I think I'd like to go to California someday. I've never been past Chicago, isn't that awful?" 

"I've never been out of the damn city," Lou said before she could stop herself. 

"This is a fine city," Susan said quickly. "The best, Papa always says. He says anything can happen here, and I think he's right." 

"Anything?"

"Sure. Why just look, it brought you to me, didn't it?" Susan looked shocked herself then, as though this time she was the one who'd said something she hadn't quite thought out. 

Lou grinned, partly to see Susan's startled expression and partly out of nerves, though why she ought to be nervous she couldn't say. "What?" 

"I only mean…well, it was so lucky, wasn't it? Your getting into trouble and my being there. As if it was fate." Susan looked away then, back down at her book. She let her hair fall in front of her face. 

Lou watched her for a long time, the room still as the grave. Then, as slowly as if she were entreating some shy animal, she reached out and tucked Susan's hair behind her ear. 

"Oh," Susan said. 

"It's pretty," Lou said. "I haven't got any myself, so." She ran her hand back through her own hair, hacked off at the jawline with a dull pair of scissors for the crime of clinging to her neck in the heat. 

Susan bit her lip, which was the same color as the roses she'd destroyed earlier. Lou thought wildly that if she got up very close she might smell just like those roses too; if she took Susan's hands and held them up to her face and breathed in—

That was it, she thought. She had to flee the room. She felt that if she didn't something terrible was bound to happen. But before she could, Susan leaned forward and kissed her. 

The weight of it was like an anvil, like Frankie's fist colliding with the side of her face. Lou cried out, in pleasure or distress or both. Susan ate the sound right up, took it right into her mouth as if it was nothing at all, and somehow that only drew Lou in the stronger. She slipped her hand around the curve of Susan's waist and Susan set her hand over Lou's, the palm clammy over Lou's knuckles. She drew Lou's hand up to the place her neckline dipped and hung away from her body, and Lou didn't have to look to know what her skin would feel like, that incomparable softness under her fingers. Susan sighed. Lou bent and kissed her in the hollow over her collarbone and Susan shivered and moved back against the headboard, drawing Lou down on top of her, and oh, her nightgown had ridden up over her thighs, which looked softer than anything, which made Lou's mouth water inexplicably—

She must be mad to think it could happen. 

"I'm sorry," Lou said, though the words grated like a skinned knee. 

Susan blinked, dazed. "What?" 

"I'm tired," Lou said. "I'm—" 

She shook her head, and before Susan could speak again she slid off the grand four poster and fled from the room, quick as a ghost down the hallway and into the bed she'd already begun to think of as her own. She drew the covers up over her head and set her hand against her breastbone and felt her heart scurry double-time like a rabbit's.

She lay there for a long time in the dark, until she was certain Susan wouldn't come after her. Then she dressed by the light of the moon that streamed in through the window, and when she was finished she went to meet it, leaning out over the sill. The roses that grew up the house nodded in the warm breeze, and the moon hung low over the city like a lantern. She sighed and slid the window further up, high enough that she could crawl out onto the sill and shin down the drainpipe. She'd come and gone from many a high-set window this way; down along the stacked cornerstones of the red brick townhouse, the finest house she'd ever known. She made it to the ground without incident or discovery, boots soft on the moss that grew over the cobbles in front of the house. She thought the gate might squeak, so she twisted her skirts into a knot and held them out of the way with one hand while she scaled the fence. And then she was free, out on the road with no one the wiser. 

She felt peace come down around her like a mantle. How she loved it, the simple pleasure of being out in the city at night, beholden to no one. She'd almost forgotten how it made her feel. She ducked her head and legged it across town with as much haste as she could manage short of breaking into a run, though it did come to that, a couple of blocks from her destination. When the moon was out like this, there was only one place her brother would be, the night too bright for dark deeds, too bright for sleeping. When they were little they'd stolen into one another's beds at the orphanage and crept to the closest window, and they'd looked out pressed cheek to cheek and Lou would tell Frankie stories about their mother, about how she was a goddess in secret like Diana the Huntress, and on the nights the moon was full she was out roving far afield, seeking her fortune. 

"Our fortunes, you mean?" Frankie would say. 

"Sure, Frank," she'd answer back. "Sure." 

She found him there tonight same as always, perched on the tile roof of the old laundry house. It was a tavern now, and kept men awash in suds instead. He was sitting between two chimneys smoking tobacco and sipping from a warm bottle of beer. 

"You steal that off some drunk?" she said, tapping him on the arm. 

"Jesus Christ," he said, dropping his cigarette. "Where the hell did you come from, Louise?"

She picked it up and set it between her teeth. "Aw, don't be pissed off, Frankie. You only call me that when you're mad." 

"Damn right I'm mad," he said. "You go throwing yourself at some strange girl's feet on the strength of this mad scheme of yours, and damned if it doesn't go and work. Only you don't think any goddamn further ahead than the next minute, do you, so you get carted off all bloody, meanwhile there's me thinking I was never going to set eyes on you again." 

She sighed. "Are you finished?" 

"No." 

He took the cigarette back from her. Frankie was always better at rolling them; hers turned to such loose and weedy messes she barely bothered to smoke at all. 

"So? What've you got to say for yourself? Have you made us rich as kings?" 

"As queens," she said. "And I'm working on it." 

"Oh, working on it. Working on it, she says! Ain't that lovely." 

He took a deep drag. His face lit all up on the strength of that cigarette, glowing orange against the inky-blue dark. She thought he looked thinner than she remembered, sharper, though it had been no time at all since she'd last seen him. 

"I am working on it," she said. "You should see this house, Frankie. It's like something out of a fairy tale. Everywhere you look's some trinket that costs a year's pay and then some, only it's just some little nothing to them."

"Who's them?" 

"The girl and her father." 

Lou felt her face heat up. She stared straight ahead, covered the half that faced him with a hand, though he couldn't have made out the particularities of her features any more than she could his without a lit smoke to help. 

"So they're real well-to-do, huh?" 

She nodded. "You could say that. But they're—they're kind. Or the girl is, anyway. She said I could stay as long as I liked." 

"You sound happy about that," he said. 

"Sure I'm happy. There's more time this way, isn't there? I can pick and choose. And trust me, the house is so big it'll take months for them to notice things gone missing, if I plan right."

He elbowed her softly in the side. "So what'd you bring me?" 

"Well, nothing yet," she said. 

"Why the hell'd you come, then?" 

"Oh, that's real nice," Lou said. "A second ago you were ready to fling your arms around me, you were so glad to see me alive." 

"And I am. Really, I am. But pardon me for thinking the whole point of this crazy idea of yours was to elevate our status. If you hadn't noticed, while you've been in the lap of luxury I've been camping out on a rooftop drinking pilfered beer, and I'd be obliged if I could change my lot sometime soon." 

"I get it, I get it. You will. You've just got to give me a while to work up to it." 

Frankie finished the cigarette and fished a bag of leaf tobacco out of his pocket to roll another. "Huh," he said. "What's there to work up to? You're a thief, ain't you?" 

"It's not that simple," Lou said. "Roll me one of those, huh?" 

"No," said Frankie petulantly. "Bring me something I can work with and I'll roll you all the cigarettes you like, but the way I see it is you're on holiday and I'm here, and so why should I roll you a cigarette? Why should I even meet you? What story did you tell her, anyway, to get her to put you up as long as you like?" 

Lou groaned. She should have seen it coming, his trump card. "You know what story. That you were my beau, and wouldn't let me leave you." 

He held up his hands. "So? What'd I say? You couldn't have done it without me." 

"Oh, screw you, _Francis_. I can handle myself just fine. I was lucky you were there, sure, but if you hadn't've been I'd have figured something else out. And don't forget who kept us afloat all these years, and how. All right?" 

He went quiet. She knew he'd be thinking about it, the things she'd done some nights when they were especially hungry, when he was out nipping ineffectually at the Hardin gang's heels. Not that they'd ever talked it over; not that she'd ever have wanted to. But still, you go out at night with nothing in your pockets, and you come back and your sister's got your breakfast paid for and more besides. Frankie was no great scholar, but it didn't take one to figure that out, or much of a detective either.

"Lou—" 

"Talk yourself up all you like," she said, getting to her feet and brushing her skirts off with feeling. "There'll be no one to hear it. I've got to be getting back." 

"You know, if I didn't know better I'd think you were dragging your heels on purpose," Frankie said. "That you'd gone soft on this girl." 

She whirled on her heel so quickly she slipped, flailing and stumbling as she caught herself. Not exactly the exit she'd been going for, but he'd brought her up short. He scrambled up to steady her, and that made her feel even worse. "You don't know what you're talking about," she said, wrenching her arm away from where he'd tried to grab her. "You don't. She's—she's a spoiled rich girl who's never worked a day in her life and never will, and I—I hate her, and I can hardly wait to rob her and her bastard father blind. So, so much for your theory, Francis Gold." 

She crossed her arms over her chest. To her horror, he was laughing, shaking in the dark. "That's quite a speech," he said, when he'd composed himself enough to speak. 

She picked up half a piece of loose roofing tile and lobbed it at him. He put up his hands, still laughing, and the shard glanced off his forearm and clattered down to the street below, where it provoked a drunken shout. 

"Goodbye, Francis," she said haughtily.

"Bye, Lou," he said. "Come and find me when you're ready to make good on these grand plans of yours." 

She turned away and walked in as stately a fashion as one could in hobnail boots on a tile mansard roof. She slid in the long-broken attic window and made her way down through the tavern corridors, listening to the sounds of fucking and carousing as they issued from the doors on either side of her path.

The night was waning as she made her way back to the tall brick townhouse. She wasn't much looking forward to clambering back up the drainpipe, but as luck had it she was late enough (or early enough) that Cook was up to get the oven lit, and as Lou came along the walk she opened up the side-door to toss out a bucket of wastewater. Having done so she went around the side of the house for some reason or other, which Lou didn't question until she'd slipped inside, gone up the back staircase, kicked off her boots and crawled back into bed with nobody in the house the wiser. 

***

The next day Lou thought over what Frankie had said, and the day after she thought about it some more. She thought about Susan in her bedroom, and she thought Susan was thinking too, because she watched Lou when she thought Lou wasn't looking, and she went around smelling of the rose perfume she kept in an ornamental glass bottle on her vanity. 

If I didn't know better, I'd think you'd gone soft on that girl. 

"Shut up, Frankie," she muttered. 

"Did you say something?" Susan looked up from her watercolor. They were sitting in the garden, Lou lost in thought, Susan with a thick pad of expensive-looking paper and a set of paints. I want to paint the flowers, she'd said. They're so beautiful, don't you think?

Lou shook her head. "No," she said. 

"I could have sworn you did." Susan slid her brush through the little square of red in her paintbox, set it against a section of paper made dark and damp with water. The color bled forth immediately as if she'd opened a vein, and she crooned to watch it go. "Isn't that lovely," she said. She looked up at Lou. Again, her eyes were wide, her pink lips slightly parted. 

"Yes," Lou said. "It's lovely." She was certain her cheeks were the color of that carmine stain; she was certain Susan was following the tide of blood across Lou's face as closely as she watched her paints sweep across the paper, riotous as a thousand roses, victorious as a returning army. 

Lou got up from the wrought-iron table, so lightweight it shook with the motion and made Susan's cup of painty water splash. "Sorry," Lou said roughly. 

"What's the matter?" 

"Nothing," Lou said. "I'm—I'm going to go inside a minute. I'll come right back." 

Susan frowned. There was a wrinkle between her eyebrows when she did that made Lou's heart pound. "Are you sure you're all right?" Susan asked. 

Lou nodded frantically. She curled her hands into fists, and before she could stop herself she turned and went into the house. Inside she wiped her palms off on her skirt. They were cloying with sweat, and she hated it, hated the way her stomach churned and her pulse fluttered. 

You're a thief, Lou Gold, she told herself just as sternly as she'd told Frankie on the rooftop under the moon. You're a thief and a robber, and the last thing you are in this world is soft, and the last thing you're going to do is lose your nerve. 

Up the stairs she went, past the door to her guest room, down the hall to Susan's room. She opened the door and went inside, half expecting something to happen as soon as she crossed the threshold, a ringing out of alarm bells, a trip wire, but there was nothing, just the shadows playing over the carpet, rose blossoms and ivy in the window moving slowly in the breeze as through water. 

"All right," she said aloud. 

She wiped her palms off on her dress again, tugged at the neckline, and the bodice that felt suddenly too tight, too hot. She went over to the vanity and sat on the little blush-pink pouf of velvet. She looked into the mirror, saw her own narrow bird's face peering back at her, hair colorless and cropped and curling round her ears. Breathlessly she took up Susan's bottle of perfume and held it to her face, squeezed the atomizer to feel it flex beneath her fingers. She set it back down, her fingers next coming to rest on Susan's jewelry box, flocked with black velveteen and lined with ivory satin. She ran her hands over the box's interior, the little compartments divided and subdivided like a rooming house. Just as she'd dreamed, each of them contained a glistening piece of jewelry. 

Lou was no lady, and she had no eye for quality, but by the dull gleam of the gold and silver and the sharp glint of the stones she knew they were real and knew they were money, and screw Francis indeed, because she was coming back to him with pockets full of treasure. She took a necklace first, something blue, a sapphire or an aquamarine, the color of Susan's eyes. She held it to the light and let it twirl and catch the overripe afternoon sun coming through the window, and then she dropped it into the pocket of her dress. A pair of earrings next, emeralds, and a pearl and garnet ring. She felt mad, seized with a curious hunger. This was it, she thought, this was all she'd manage, not a slow bleed but a smash and grab, and she'd meant it all to be ever so much more sophisticated, but in the moment she found she didn't care. Perhaps she'd simply run from the house when she got her fill, past Susan in the garden, tear past the flimsy table and upend her painting.

There was no warning, Lou would think later. No sound, no footfall on the stair. There was only Lou's face in the mirror and then Susan's face over her shoulder, as if she'd simply materialized in the room like a ghost. 

"What on earth do you think you're doing?" 

Lou flew to her feet and whirled to face her, and immediately Susan advanced, got Lou pressed between the vanity and her body, which seemed now supple and whip-smart as a birch tree. She grabbed Lou's wrist and prised her hand from the surface of the vanity, peeled her fingers back and took the necklace she'd been holding, a cameo on a golden chain. She took it in her fist and held a length of it before Lou's face, letting it sway like a hypnotist's pocket watch. 

"This has an inscription on the back," Susan said. "Do you know what it says?" 

Lou shook her head. 

"C.M.," Susan said. "For Catherine Moore. My mother," she said, though the clarification was hardly necessary. "This was my mother's, Lou." 

"I'm sorry," Lou said. "Susan—" 

Susan flung the necklace to one side and reached up. Lou flinched, but Susan was undaunted. She grasped Lou's face, fingertips digging into the meat of her cheeks. "You're hurting me," Lou said. The words came out slightly muffled. She longed to look away, to seek the pendant on the floor, perhaps, but she had no choice now but to look straight into Susan's eyes, now limpid with tears. 

"I don't care," Susan said. "You know, I'm hardly even surprised? To find you here like this? In fact I counted on it, only—only it still hurts me, Lou, it still makes me so sad." 

"Susan—" 

"Where were you going, did you say? That day at the station?" 

"I told you," Lou said. "Out west. Out to California." 

Susan dropped her hand. She dropped entirely, sinking to the floor in a quivering pile of silk taffeta. Her skirt was flecked with red paint. _Again,_ Lou thought, and again she went to the ground before her. Susan was crying in earnest now, and on impulse Lou moved to wipe her cheek, to smooth her hair back from her face. 

"Susan," she repeated. 

"You didn't have any luggage," Susan said, shoulders shaking. "How were you meant to go anywhere without any luggage?" 

Lou wanted to die, to sink into the floor. Somehow, she thought, this was worse than being dragged before a magistrate, worse than being hung in a public square. "I'm sorry," she said. "Look, I'll—I'll give you everything back, and I'll go." 

"I don't want you to go," Susan said through her tears. "I want you to stay here with me." 

Lou was emptying her pockets with shaking hands, piling her spoils up in Susan's lap. "But I can't," she said miserably. "I've just—I've just tried to rob you." 

Susan shook her head. "Not if you stay with me. If you stay with me it'll be as if this never happened. You were a poor waif of a girl and I took you into my home to be—to be a companion to me, and we lived happily ever after and none of this ever happened." 

The idea was staggering in its magnitude, in just how unexpected it was. Yet as she thought of it Lou realized that there had been a part of her all along that hadn't ever expected to leave. Her heart quickened to imagine it, and that small bright fragment of her soul that was unsurprised seemed to grow, to be filled out with blood and with air. 

"Your father wouldn't believe it," Lou said. 

Susan leaned closer, grasping at Lou's skirts, her hands. "My father is miserly," she said. "He'll be overjoyed not to have to pay for a wedding. And he loves me and wants me to be happy, and if you stay here with me he'll have no reason to suspect anything but what I tell him." 

Lou's brain had snagged on a single word. "Wedding?" 

"Who was that young man on the platform?" said Susan. She looked frantic, and she breathed as if she were running.

Lou gulped. "My brother," she said. 

"You've never had a beau," said Susan. "Have you?" 

"No," Lou said. "And the truth is I'm not likely to, either." She looked at the floor, at the white knuckles of Susan's hands, at the dizzying pattern on the Oriental rug, at her own battered cuticles. 

"Neither am I," said Susan. She sniffed, reached up and hooked a finger beneath Lou's chin. "Look at me," she said. Lou did. 

"Stay," said Susan. 

Lou didn't have the nerve to ask, _or what?_ She shook her head. "My brother—" 

Susan pawed at the flotsam in her lap. "Don't be silly," she said. "There will be something here that I can part with. Something that will set your brother up properly, and then the rest will be up to him, won't it?" She palmed Lou's cheek, ran a thumb tantalizingly over the bow of her lips. 

"You've been so cunning," Susan said. "All your life. Won't it be nice to have a rest?" 

Yes, thought Lou hazily. She'd begin, she thought, with her mouth on Susan's, and in the long years that followed she'd remember that moment clearest of all: the way the summer seemed to still with the force of their kiss. Her tongue in Susan's mouth, the swish and rustle of fabric like dry leaves, the prickle of sweat, the scent of rose perfume.


End file.
